I had a Dell Desktop that was shipped with a 64MB onboard
video card and 256MB DDR RAM.
When the computer was first shipped to me, under both
BIOS and WinXP, the comp showed only 212MB of RAM. I ran
the Dell Diagnostics and it showed that the "missing"
44MB of RAM were faulty, i.e. part of the chip was not
working. Hence I say fried. (Dell replaced the chip
obviously...)
As for the onboard video card, yes part of the RAM will
be devoted towards the video card, but the full amount
should still show up in BIOS and under system properties.
My desktop shows the full 512 MB of RAM in it (after I
intalled more), and my laptop uses an ATI 9200 Mobility
(Shared Memory, i.e. using some RAM for video purposes)
32MB card, and yet under both BIOS and WinXP I see the
full 512MB of RAM.
Nick